Thoughts on indie game development. Humor. General crabbiness and bad feelings.

Tuesday, September 30, 2014

Are Addictive Free-To-Play Games Ethical? Let's Fight!

Come with me now, as we stare unflinchingly into the face of Ultimate Evil.

A few months ago, I wrote a blog post defending Big Free-To-Play. You know, the evil, soulless big money mobile game makers us indies are supposed to totally hate and stuff. Because finally managing to turn your mom into a serious gamer was SO BAD.

My piece received rebuttals that were worth addressing, and I want to do a little of that now, because I have a new game coming out soon, and I could use the clicks. So.

Objection 1:

Most free-to-play game profits come from a handful of compulsive whales who spend a ton of money. These games use a wide variety of psychological trickery to force players into being addicted and spending outlandishly. This is unethical.

The first two sentences of the previous paragraph are unquestionably true. The big question is the third sentence. Are these games unethical?

And trust me, the techniques these games use can get really shady. For example, a game might offer you the chance to spend money to win a tough level. If you do this, you may well find that the price to do it goes UP. Once the game identifies you as an easy mark, it will start milking you for cash.

Is this sort of thing morally wrong? If you answered quickly, you might want to rethink it. It's a hard choice. A gray area. Internet debates tend to deal really super badly with issues with gray areas, but we might as well dig in a little. Indies developers tend to want to see themselves as moral people, so the question is how we feel comfortable getting money away from people is an important one.

"Freedom is not worth having if it does not connote freedom to err and even to sin." - Mahatma Gandhi. So you see? I'm right and you're wrong.

A Relevant and Instructive True Story

We used to handle all of my company's sales ourselves. We could charge credit cards, and people would call us to talk on the phone to an Actual Person. Yeah, it was a total pain.

Every so often, we'd get a person who just had bad credit. They'd give us a credit card number. It would be rejected because they were at their limit. They'd give another. At their limit. Again and again, until they finally found a credit card that they could squeeze another $25 credit out of to buy our game.

Whenever this happened, we'd think, "Dude, you are in a lot of debt. You're in trouble. We don't know what you need, but it's not our game."

We could have refused the order from Mister Way-In-Debt. Or, we could have given the game away for free.

We never did either. We took the money.

So you tell me. Was that the right thing to do?

Doesn't the mere presence of this image make my arguments feel more right? (Yes. Yes, it does.)

And Who Cares?

Every so often, someone will think, based on my work and writing, they can nail down my political views with a simple label. This always makes me laugh a little. My political views are a dog's breakfast of points of view from all over the spectrum, shaped by a lifetime of experience. Much like yours.

(The United States is in a situation where it seems like each half of the population thinks that the other half are idiots and jerks and their beliefs are utterly wrong and indefensible. Which would mean that 100% of us are wrong.)

One of my points of view is that we must always place great value on personal responsibility. If person A wants to sell something at a given price and person B (freely and without coercion) wants to buy it at that price and the exchange does no clear, measurable harm to any person C, then that exchange is fine. It should be allowed, and any busybody D who has an opinion about it should probably go bother someone else.

This is a really rough philosophical position to take. Is running a casino ethical? Is the state selling lottery tickets ethical? Is selling meth ethical? Is selling tobacco ethical? (My personal answers: No. NO. No. Just barely yes. Though I might change my mind tomorrow.)

And, even if these four things are not ethical, should they be prevented? Because preventing them has a cost: Infringing on the freedom of the people involved to do what they want with their limited time on this Earth.

If I refused to sell a game to Mister Way-In-Debt, I am taking away his freedom. If I give him the game for free, that infringes on my freedom to make a living and buy little trinkets like food and shelter.

And who knows? Maybe selling the game to Mister Way-In-Debt helped him. The $25 price isn't crippling, and our games are huge. They might have kept him out of trouble for 40 hours. Or gave him a few moments of peace from his quite possibly considerable troubles.

The point is that you shouldn't judge. I shouldn't judge. Mister Way-In-Debt is a free person. That freedom is of far bigger importance than the game, or the debt, or your opinion.

This is even true for entertainment products. Remember, I come from a country where the right to "pursuit of happiness" is enshrined in the second sentence of our founding document.

"The smallest minority on earth is the individual. Those who deny individual rights cannot claim to be defenders of minorities. But even the strongest, most free individual cannot find the proper mana cost for Starving Buzzard." - Ayn Rand

Whoah! This Is Getting Heavy!

I know, right? That's what happens when you start tossing around trivial little words like "right" and "wrong".

So Answer the Question. Are These Games Right or Wrong?

I don't know. I change my mind about it every other day.

Look, the facts are that these games are almost entirely subsidized by taking the brains of some compulsive, addiction-prone "whales" and cracking them wide open. They spend literally ridiculous amounts of money, and the rest of us get games for free. And yes, this makes me feel icky.

But if I went out of business and had to look for work and the only job open to me was working on a game like that? I'd probably take the gig. I wouldn't feel super-awesome about it, but I don't think it's so objectionable that I'd starve for the principle.

Gee, Jeff. Thanks For the Wisdom. Would You Like To Close This Out By Getting REALLY Pretentious?

If you don't mind.

I AM SO OUT OF HERE.

Oh, hang on just a second. I'm going to get all bedrock ethical ethos with you.

I don't think it's safe to drink alcohol, or smoke, or gamble, or become a stuntman, or climb Mount Everest, or blog on social justice issues, or do drift racing, or ride horses, or fight in The Octagon. But I have to respect your freedom to do those things, as long as the only person harmed is you. Which means I have to allow people to provide the ability to do these things, because forbidding them would infringe on your freedom to have them.

This isn't kooky libertarianism. This is a fundamental principle of my country.

So think what you want. Say what you want. Try to direct compulsive spenders to more reasonable alternatives. (I think it's bonkers for anyone to spend a ton on Candy Crush when so much cheaper equivalents are available.) And that, I'm afraid, is the end of the issue. If you, with the pure power of prudence and rationality on your side, can't convince the lost to play a different game, maybe your viewpoint wasn't as indestructibly self-evident as you thought.

Here's where I respectfully disagree: The addictive, free-to-play games have a bait-and-switch built into them. They claim to be free, but are in truth absolutely un-free. One example of this is a "free" mobile game called Lil Alchemist, or something along those lines. I picked it up on my iPhone and played it for a couple days.

The core mechanic to it kinda like a combination between the Magic: The Gathering and Doodle God. You'd get a hand of 5 cards, each had an attack value and a defense value, and you could either play one or combine two to get more powerful cards from pre-coded combinations (One of my favorites was Bat + Golem or Bat + Earth = Gargoyle), then your card and your opponent's card fought, dealing damage to each other. If a card's attack was greater than an enemy card's defense, the difference in damage was dealt to the opponent's life. First one to hit 0 life loses. Pretty simple, pretty straightforward, kinda fun. Not something I was raving about to friends, but it kept me entertained.

However, that game had a half-dozen systems designed to make you have to pay money to play the game. For example, you got one "action" every 10 minutes, and the cap on actions was painfully low -- about 5 to start, slowly increasing. Simply playing the game cost actions, each match (against the AI, no less!) was parceled out stingily. And of course as you progressed in the game, the costs to play increased irrevocably: Early enemies cost 1 action to play against, then two. Presumably it kept going to 3 or 4 but I stopped playing before it got that far. Oh, and you could re-battle old enemies. Except the more you fought them, the more actions it cost to do so. Fighting the first enemy repeatedly could easily start costing you 4+ actions per fight -- meaning you have to wait 40 minutes just to play the game again.

In addition, the difficulty spiked up about 1/3 of the way through the game's campaign. Conveniently, there were ways to get more powerful. You could buy new cards (only the worst pack of new cards was available for game currency), you could research new combinations to find more powerful combinations among your existing cards (and it took 24 HOURS TO RESEARCH EACH COMBINATION), and you could upgrade your cards for better stats with a resource gained by breaking down old cards (but you could only break down cards you had researched 100% of the combinations of, and upgrading cards didn't help the duplicates in a deck, you had to upgrade each individual card).

So where did the game take your money? Well, you could refill your actions for real money, you could buy patently better cards for real money, you could speed up researches for real money, and you could buy additional research slots to do more researches in parallel for real money.

In the end, the game was essentially unplayable, unless you were willing to spend real money. The claim that it was "free to play" was false for all intents and purposes. Every mechanic was aimed to keep the player coming back, with the end goal of addicting them to get them to pay money for the game. The action mechanic -- especially the miserly cap on stored actions -- would keep players coming back each hour, the research mechanic would keep players coming back each day, and the upgrade mechanic would keep players buying booster packs even once they had all the cards. And once paying real money started, this little mobile game could rapidly cost more than a big-budget AAA title. (IIRC, refilling actions was about $2. Good booster packs were similarly-priced.)

You know, you mentioned selling meth as an example of an unethical thing to do. Why is selling meth unethical while this isn't? What is so unethical about meth in particular? These games are designed to addict people, just like meth does, and they also use the same tactic that the worst scum of the meth dealers use: They market to people with poor/impaired judgement (like kids!) and they promise it's free. Well, the first hit's free...

Nik Davidson (amazon.com) on the target market for free-to-play games:

"We like to think that the ones spending vast sums on these games are sons of Dubai oligarchs, but we have the data to prove that they're not, and that they probably can't afford to spend what they're spending. We're saying our market is suckers -- we're going to cast a net that catches as many mentally ill people as we can!"

Perhaps the free choice to spend yourself bankrupt isn't as free as it seems.

If they can't afford to spend what they're spending, they're creating debt for themselves. If they have no way to pay it back, they are hurting the banks, who are party C from Jeff's original point. This, combined with the rest of the shitty credit decisions this country makes, would affect every party C in here.

Some people is gonna throw the money they earn at you, at drugs, at bad investments, to whatever. Some people are like that, and you just can make profit giving in exchange a good game both for premiums and freeplayers.

Myself, Nearly never spent a dime in a F2P, not even when I think they deserved that (Fallen Earth); But if I think they deserve some of my love, I can find a way to squish the maximum profit for the minimun cost (1 month subscription once when benefits are forever, for example, like Star Trek Online, that combined with the abiltiy to make real money tokens means that effort makes every achiveable (Spent 1 month of daily effort saving to purchase a Temporal Science Vessell in the actuion instead of spending my entire life to open lock-boxes). Lockboxs, for example, are a very dirty bussiness, but if you make shareables and auctionable its contents there's a whole different thing (Along the ability to make real-money coins with effort). But anyway, you can hear people whinning 'cause they paid 200€ to win a the same ship and never comes... You're an adult, Is what gambling has; Is upon him what he does with the money;

In the case of that game, I even repeated subscription to profit from other combined offers. So I paid in total like 30$ for more than 8 months playing Star Trek Online and feel nor a bit scamed all the time. Other people don't know what to do with money (sometimes 'cause they even don't know how to earn it), so is up to them spending 200$ a month in locked boxes for as much as 20$ profit...

(And 30$ is a price far low to enjoy all the goodness of STO...so it's well expended. I play now time to time Archeage, where people paid the 150$ founder pack +subscription to play an unplayable game and can't enjoy the features they paid for (as land for their houses, etc). And thats not even microtransactions, is suposed to be a closed gift box...) But that's on if you're making a enjoyable game, not about making profit. (or is it?)

German courts are hellbent right now to protect the consumers. The EU commission is also on a warpath to regulate F2P. We will see what borders will be drawn. Unlimited freedom equals unlimited exploitation seems to be the consensus of the lawmakers right now.

For your example of the 25$, though, keep in mind that you took only those 25$. Imagine you where the one bringing all those creditcards to the limit with your 40hour game. I am, as you are, torn between the two positions. My solution to this is to find a middleground and condemn both extreme positions. It is wrong to destroy a life (yes, debts kill) for a small consumer good. It is also wrong to "protect" that life by regulating all his choices.

German telephone companies got forced to pull the line when too many costs where generated with expensive (sex) hotlines. I feel the EU might go for a similar approach and demand a hardcap on earnings a company can milk out of a customer per day. Also expect SEVERE regulations to protect children.

Ethics and morality might not be absolute, in which case we will not reach a consensus on this. Having eliminated the ability to make s universally "right" choice we must rely on individuals and lawmakers to do what they feel is right or aligns best with public opinion or public interest. The best action I think is to gather and disseminate facts to enable people to make good decisions. I think improved labelling like the way app stores now label f2p games with "in app purchases" next to the free price is helpful since I know not to bother putting that on my kids' iPads. I think a label for apps or games with ads would be good too. And also providing good reports about the profile of the "whales" and to what degree their life is impacted. I think much of this is already in progress, which is promising.

"I have to allow people to provide the ability to do these things, because forbidding them would infringe on your freedom to have them."

It's important to look at things from the perspective of the individual, but society is a group of individuals and individual choices en masse ultimately have consequences, even if they are choices that seem on the micro level to be insignificant beyond the individual. I agree that the rights of the individual are a fundamental part of the political culture of the United States, but collective and communal rights are too. I would argue that we are in a time when individualism is being overemphasized at the expense of the group.

With regards to addictive free to play games, yeah, its probably not going to harm society as a whole in a major way, although individual lives might be ruined. But there are certainly aspects of American society that are being defended in the name of individual liberty that are ultimately endangering the group in the way I described (I could provide examples, but don't want to at the moment in order to avoid opening cans of worms that could lead to unrelated stuff).

I think the German courts are taking the right stance on this. It's absolutely not the vendor's responsibility to restrict the buyer's choice (unless it's illegal or similar), but that doesn't mean that there can't be protections required by wider society -- I think that's the best way to handle it.

I guess my example would be F2P games aimed at kids. It isn't necessarily unethical, but maybe it's appropriate to be careful what you advertise to them.

Good points all around, but I'm not sure if the morality of F2P tactics is the real issue here. Or at least it's not the main problem with F2P as far as I'm concerned.

The real issue for me is that F2P is denying us good games. Games that I would want to play. Imagine an alternative reality in which the original Dungeon Keeper was never made. Instead, it only had the mobile, free-to-run, pay-or-wait-to-play remake. That wold would win one less episode of Internet outrage, but would also be denied a classic game that I and many others would have wanted to play.

And I'm yet to hear of anyone involved in the actual, nuts-and-bolts process of making games who actually likes F2P and believes them to be anything other than the cost of doing business and surviving in Today's post race-to-the-bottom mobile gaming market.

Can you, Jeff, think of a way to incorporate F2P mechanics in one of your games, or any game for that matter, without feeling that you've compromised on your vision and that you've purposefully made a lesser game?

So long as politics interfering in public economy, in my country, supposed to be from the "First World", has been edicted than in crowfunfings, normal people and minor companies can only give 10.000€ a month to crowfunding, 3.000 top for single project. Big companies can spend wathever they want...

Jonathan Blow gave a pretty good talk on free-to-play games a while ago. The issue he addresses is not so much ethics, but the constraints that the model places on the end product. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AxFzf6yIfcc

Clearly, it shouldn't be illegal to make free-to-play games, and getting into the ethics is asking to disappear down the rabbit hole. However, the reasons that I generally avoid the genre are certainly addressed in the video. (Like anything, I've found exceptions)

If there is one problem with free-to-play, beyond encouraging shoddy products, it's the pressure it puts on the market. Publishers are more likely to push for it, and devs on mobile are going to have a hard time competing if they don't want to have micropayments, since products are expected to be either cheap, or free.

Fortunately for us all, I believe the PC games market is still alive and well, and filled with people willing to pay money for a complete, quality product (even if Steam sales and Humble Bundles have driven down expected prices).

I've been trying the original versions and I'm pretty sure Avernum 2's my favorite so far,though I'm wondering if this version still has similar controls (num pad + a "look" function that brings up a bunch of letters) I actually like using the keyboard over just clicking everything.Though,it'll probably be good regardless! :)﻿~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~>>>Super Hero-Android Game

Can you, Jeff, think of a way to incorporate F2P mechanics in one of your games, or any game for that matter, without feeling that you've compromised on your vision and that you've purposefully made a lesser game?

Avernum 2: Crystal Souls is taking over my dreams.In fact,a few nights ago,I dreamt that Crystal Souls was released and the demo region was the same as it was in Avernum 2 and Exile 2.And then I woke up and I was like "oh."﻿

I agree with your stance. But as someone that doesn't live in the USA I find it jarring that you pointed out that you think that because of your country. This is obviously because of how you were educated and brought up. It is a cultural stance. All of that makes sense but you cut that short just bringing up your country as the justification. (Even if that is what you ultimately mean.)

I think there should be freedom for those games as there is freedom to other things without responsibility too. It feels icky that people do it. But you could argue that the alcohol and tobacco industry is sustained by those that abuse it too to their own detriment.

Maybe we wouldn't be able to get whiskey this cheap if people weren't abusing it. Prohibiting/limiting one's ability to do so is crazy talk, however I do think we should better raise our kids to really understand that doing that is wrong.

I don't hear people talking about in schools that spending money ludicrously or that you can't spare on a game is wrong, but maybe it should be said. And calling out those games as being bad games for depending on it should be as acceptable as calling out the people doing that.

I only call it out for people that I care about and only if they're not already aware of it. I've seen people mess up their lives because of alcohol and tobacco. I don't think it's far fetched to say people also ruin their lives because of some of those games.

Well… round about every blog posts online don’t have much originality as I found on yours.. Just keep updating much useful information so that reader like me would come back over and over again...Obat tbcObat gagal ginjalObat Diabetes Melitus

When you get into a tight place and everything goes against you, till it seems as though you could not hang on a minute longer, never give up then, for that is just the place and time that the tide will turn. Pengobatan tumor jinak di kepala

Pengobatan epilepsi recycling is a way to help people for the garbage problems. Every year Indonesia produces at least million ton garbage. The garbage is sent to landfills, where most of them pollute the land and air. As a result of recycling, garbage that would have been thrown away are reused instead in new products of Khasiat daun sirsak untuk jantung

Thanks for the data, perhaps I will use this over my tufted selling and i have been use much annulus Mainedia in run a interaction and that they somebody existing a giant amend on me. Agen Bola OnlineAgen Judi Bola

update new-best free Cartoon Games online from internet. Toon Games is a free online cartoon flash games site where you can find games from all your favorite cartoons such as Mario GamesFrivDoraemon GamesKizi and many more.

Busy life circumstances than the current world history. Must try to earn money to support themselves, their families and pay for living. But not so that you neglect your own health, but more must cherish it.Pou Games | Dora games

To flee war, to protect the lives of themselves and their families, and must live with the rhythm of society, sometimes makes people feel comfortable smell. Be strong in the harshness of life, you will succeed.Mario Games,Friv,Doraemon Games,Kizi

Thanks for the best blog.it was very useful for me.keep sharing such ideas in the future as well.this was actually what i was looking for,and i am glad to came here! earn to dieHi! I’ve been reading your blog for a while now and finally got the courage to go ahead and give youu a shout out from Austin Texas! Just wanted to tell you keep up the fantastic work!my weblog:tank trouble tank trouble

Thanks for the best blog.it was very useful for me.keep sharing such ideas in the future as well.this was actually what i was looking for,and i am glad to came here!

hotmail sign in Hotmail is an email account of Microsoft Corporation. Like Google’s Gmail, it is full of the features of a regular email.

hotmail login Hotmail was previously a quite popular email service. It has the features and utilities similar to other email services, but users encountered many annoying issues, and even lost fees they had paid for this service.

recover hotmail password Therefore, there are many users who have a registered Hotmail account but no longer wish to use it as they are unhappy with the service.

sign in to Hotmail At this time, some users sought to remove their Hotmail account, but has some difficulties as it is a complicated process.

I recently came across your article and have been reading along. I want to express my admiration of your writing skill and ability to make readers read from the beginning to the end. I would like to read newer posts and to share my thoughts with you, Jual Obat Pembesar

We are really grateful for your blog post. You will find a lot of approaches after visiting your post. Great work.

Such a very useful article. Very interesting to read this article.I would like to thank you for the efforts you had made for writing this awesome article. Sign in to Gmail to access to all Gooogle services. Log in to your account or sign up to create a new accountgmail sign in

In this game, you start at the cavern men's age, then evolve! There is a total of 5 ages, each with its units and turrets. Take control of 16 different units and 15 different turrets to defend your base and destroy your enemy. age of war

We are really grateful for your blog post. You will find a lot of approaches after visiting your post. Great work.happy wheels

The game controls are shown just under . Movement mechanisms primarily include acceleration and tilting controls. It consists of a total of 17 levels and the challenge you face in each level increases as you go up. The game basically has a red ball that has to be moved across the various obstacles in its path to the goal. In order to gain the highest tanh trouble | tank trouble 2 scores you should try to avoid the difficulties, be smart and quick. The game offers you tank death matches where you should show off your concentration and accurate shots the only way towards success . If your performance will be good, the game will reward you. Some bonuses will appear during the game play of tank trouble unfair mario unfair mario 2 | tank trouble 3

Life becomes more interesting and wonderful when you share your memorable moments with friends and family through unique photographs. You can create your own unique style impressed with image editing software. And after hours of work stress you can also

Life becomes more interesting and wonderful when you share your memorable moments with friends and family through unique photographs. You can create your own unique style impressed with image editing software. And after hours of work stress you can also dr driving, dr driving baixar ,download dr driving, dr driving

Life becomes more interesting and wonderful when you share your memorable moments with friends and family through unique photographs. You can create your own unique style impressed with image editing software. And after hours of work stress you can also

Friv 10 gaming supplies a podium that will be certainly very recollective in terms of creating a person jump into the world of gambling. The greatest advantage of Friv Games that are online is that the user has a variety of activities from which are absent at a click of the second, at drops that are equal to pick. Many people are aware of the fact individuals commonly do not employ 100% of these brain function. Games like questions, logic-based trivia, games and problem solving games help brain function. Friv 100Friv 100Ploy GamesFriv 8Zynga GameNormally individuals employ one-part of the brain but mental performance of an individual doesn't just one part of the brain but almost all places are useful and effective by enjoying these particular kinds.

They enable the people to enjoy their time without the cost and are mostly free. These material range from basic text-based games to those who include design. There are single-player and multi-player online games. Single player FrivFriv 1Friv GamesKiziY8Friv 6Friv 3Io GamesFriv 2020Friv 68 are played by way of a single person for his own

Really impressive post. I liked your article and I hope you will have many entries or more. I enjoyed your article and planning to rewrite it on my own blog.You can play games online my website Friv UnblockedY8 UnblockedKizi Unblocked

Online Betting A game to create a simple life.คาสิโนออนไลน์ Online Betting Sites Interesting games allow you to access a variety of games. Whether it's a roulette game, a slots game, a hi-lo game, it's an interesting game, so we have to enjoy the best. Our service has focused on most online gambling games. Because betting is fast. Wherever However, it is easy to join the bets with fast technology. One more level

Through the use of communication tools such as mobile phones, laptop computers, these devices are up-to-date and easy to use for thousands of bets. There are thousands of people online. It seems that there are some unknown groups. But I want to know more about these games. You can log on to online gambling as best as possible through more advanced communication devices to the next level in online gaming. good time Online Gambling Games It is another part of the fun of the game. คาสิโนออนไลน์

About Me

Indie development's self-declared Crazy Old Uncle In the Attic. Founded Spiderweb Software in 1994. Since then, has written many games, including the Exile, Geneforge, Avadon, and Avernum series and Nethergate: Resurrection. Has also done much writing, including the Grumpy Gamer series for Computer Games Magazine, the View From the Bottom series for IGN, and the book The Poo Bomb: True Tales of Parental Terror.